Tag Archives: killer idea

Once again, publigeekaire is at the forefront of the “Urban Bowling” buzz. This is the name of Nissan Qashqai’s new viral film (done by TBWA) that is making the rounds of Facebook these past few days. A complement to the televised paintball spot (see below) and a homage to the famous Sony Bravia spot (with 2 million views on YouTube, see above). Urbanproof like no other?

This post was a spontaneous suggestion via twitter from @MathieuFlex, better known around these parts as Publigeekaire, one of my favorite twitterers and bloggers.

At Pleasure Beach in Blackpool, England, Cadbury decided to reproduce the experience of a troop of scouts in 1980 (that was immortalized on television) who decided to combine the pleasures of Cadbury ice cream with that of a Roller Coaster. For the 30th anniversary of this memorable video, Cadbury Icecreamland recreated the experience on the same Roller Coaster, with similarly funny results. Check out the website here.

I saw this on Emilie Ogez’s blog (@eogez), who posted some surprising news from BBC Mundo. Apparently, two HP researchers, Sitaram Asur and Bernardo Huberman, have created an algorithm that allows one to predict the success of a movie based on 3 criteria: the number of tweets generated about it, the longevity of the tweets, and their nature (positive, negatigve or neutral). This algorithm is founded on the analysis of 3 million tweets concerning 25 films, including Avatar. The results have 97% reliability. The precision of certain results is quite surprising: the algorithm predicted 16.8 million dollars in profits for the opening week of The Crazies—and the profits turned out to be 16.6 million! The same algorithm predicted 30.7 million dollars for the opening week of Dear John (see tear-jerker trailer below), which garnered 30.5 million dollars!

The algorithm is particularly good for movies whose target audience is similar to twitter users: young, tech-savvy, with a high purchasing power. As a result, the algorithm is less accurate for other target audiences, such as children. One wonders if this means of predicting a movie’s success based on Twitter could also predict the profitability of brands or of a political candidate….

Thanks to Geoffroy Chamouton, for suggesting this post on twitter (@gchamouton). Do you know the Stanford Mobile Phone (or Mo-Pho in Stanford Speak) Orchestra? Thought up by Stanford professor Ge Wang, who found out how to amplify the iPhone as you would a guitar or flute (through the application Ocarina) the above video is pretty spectacular.